Hello all,
i know this seems like a stupid question to ask in this community, but i am serious.
To me: i am generally comfortable around computers, tried a few simple projects (like a music streamer based on a rpi) but i have no real education on this - all i do is follow the documentation and then google for troubleshooting. I am also (kinda) privacy focused and really annoyed at all the enshittification observable everywhere so i installed revanced and about half a year ago when i bought a new laptop i set my old thinkpad up as a proxmox-server. This is running my HomeAssistant-Instance in one VM and has another VM running ubuntu for my docker containers (paperless-ngx and immich). I really like the services these provide, but to be honest i feel uncomfortable with entrusting my data to them, as i am constantly worried i will break something and corrupt the data. Also i think i underestimated the amount of updates and maintenance that accumulates.
I am also not really willing to spend too much time learning all this from the ground up, as my dayjob is 8h in front of the computer anyway, so i dont want to spend my whole evening or weekend there as well.
I guess what i am really searching for is a service which i can just trust and pay for myself OR a very userfriendly suite of selfhosted apps.
Services i need would be:
- general cloud storage
- document organization (a la paperless-ngx)
- photos
I would also like:
- some kind of shared notes
- a media suite (like plex)
I am fine with Home Assistant, as that has no real consequences should i really mess it up badly
Thank you for any suggestions on how to move on in this matter.
You could but a NAS, or build one and install unraid on it. It should take a day or so of tinkering to get it working, and you could always sync your data to a cloud backup provider.
Why unraid and not truenas?
Easier to use imo. TrueNAS would be better, but takes more time to learn how to use.
that would only handle the backups (and possible data loss) right?
all the tinkering about the specific services is the same on unraid isn´t it?A lot of NAS are capable of hosting containerized services. The Synology DS series, for example, can run everything you’ve mentioned and so much more. For a relatively gentle into check out https://mariushosting.com/
thank you, i will look into that
As a point of reference, I built a 32TB Synology last year. I took me an afternoon to get it done, plus set up Plex media server, all the arrs and friends, a backup server and a couple other things. Since then maintenance has consisted of remembering to hit the “update containers” button once a month or so. I should probably automate that part but just haven’t bothered yet.
I use Watchtower for keeping my containers up to date (apologies if you’re already familiar). Has been very much a set-it-and-forget-it experience.
Yeah unraid is the same, it just adds a Gui to make it easier to learn. The downside is that unraid is very non-standard and is basically impossible to back up or manage in source control like vanilla docker or kubernetes
Unraid is pretty simple to use. It has made setting up my services easy with just a little bit of googling for trouble shooting.
